


Canda Munanee

by oldbosie



Category: Star Wars Prequel Trilogy
Genre: Angst, F/M, Florid prose, M/M, Multi, no sex as of yet
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-07-03
Updated: 2013-07-03
Packaged: 2017-12-17 14:15:34
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 8,765
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/868513
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/oldbosie/pseuds/oldbosie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Jedi Council's reservations regarding Anakin's knighthood result in a further trial—first deployment takes the form of an excursion to eliminate new and lethal technology from the vicinity of Coruscanti government members, and is, of course, supervised by Obi-Wan Kenobi. </p><p>There is exploration of accommodating the discrete capacities in which Anakin is able to love, differentiating between love of his wife and love of his mentor.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> In progress/unfinished. Does not take into account events portrayed in The Clone Wars television TV series.

The Temple housed a great many living souls, shrouded in muslin, tailored and braided. Resolutely diminutive Padawans circling the corridors like hopeful desert moons; powerful, enlightened Knights, commanding or indebted; a constellation of reverent Masters, painted in colors with somber grey faces. Some were skilled in their use of the Force, some devout, some feeble audacious mockingbirds or consigned and timid practitioners. But all, Anakin concluded, waist-deep in ceramic trenchers, were prodigious consumers of food.

The next time he felt inclined to update the Hologram Room’s simulations, he would wait until they had all entered a period of fast.

A window yawned behind him, letting evening sunlight graze his shoulders with its weary glare. Swallowed to the elbow in oily, pale water, he had forsaken his splattered tunic by the threshold. He was clumsy enough, or rather, haphazard, that mirrored pools gathered on the floor between his toes. He wasn’t angry, not really—most punishments he received at the hands of the Council were marginally well deserved. But his fingers, his flesh-and-blood fingers were wrinkled and raw, the skin pinched in amphibious folds and sensitive, suddenly, to the impractically coarse clay from which he daily ate.

Where shame should have stung his stomach, hunger scalded instead. His present antipathy toward any vessel of food or drink was sufficiently strong to make him willing to abstain from using one himself. Rolling his tongue wistfully along his teeth, he toyed with placeholders and daydreams—cherries and citrons sinking below the horizons of his eyes. And without warning, without so much as a flicker of humility or guilt, his mouth filled with some other vision: the dewy rose of someone else’s smile, dawn-fair flesh of face and fingers burning in the evening sun. He winced as his own skin burned; he grimaced, childishly, and spat the image out. It had resembled no one in particular.

“Ani, you’ll hurt yourself that way.”

“Son of a whore—"

Anakin skidded on the flagstone, beaded with nacreous soap bubbles and alarmingly slick. A teacup burst over ground as a hand, firm and deft, seized his upper arm. Obi-Wan pulled Anakin to his feet, glancing briefly at the cup that had spread, flowerlike, into pointed petals. Anakin stared. He doubted whether his master had ever let so much as a pin drop unintentionally. The same thought seemed to have occurred to Obi-Wan.

“When I say you’ll hurt yourself,” he said, relinquishing Anakin none too gently, “the very last thing you want to do is wheel around like a startled cat.”

“I didn’t _wheel_ —”

“You did, and almost broke your neck! In any case, I expected you to realize I was coming.”

Anakin turned away to flick his eyes at the vaulted ceiling.

“I’m in detention,” he said. “I’m not using your fancy _Force_.”

Obi-Wan chuckled.

“You shouldn’t have needed it.” He held out his hand, and with it the stiff, salt-encrusted bread they served in the halls. “You’re hungry.”

“I’m not,” mumbled Anakin, blushing.

“Ever the bad liar, Ani.”

With swollen, pliant fingers, the younger took what he was offered. _I told you not to call me Ani_ , he thought of saying, before realizing he never really had. Not really. The bread was hollowed out, pulled apart, stoppered by a mosaic of berries with frosted porcelain skins. A function of efficiency, not of art, Anakin knew—Obi-Wan’s aesthetic was far too practical—but also, perhaps, of kindness. His choices were unrelentingly reminiscent. He managed, somehow, even as a cloistered stalwart, to weave the warm threads of sentiment into everything he did. Yet the rattle of annoyance in Anakin’s ribs was pacified by the familiarity of the rolling berries in his palm. His master’s sentiment always had, despite its routine, an effect. I _fell out of that tree. I was twelve, but it wasn’t fair, I wouldn’t have fallen, except—_ He couldn’t remember. He wouldn’t. He brushed it aside, and, with a defensive smile, let one of them rupture on his tongue.

“Isn’t this…what’s that word…favoritism?”

“Of course. I don’t know a member of the Temple who hasn’t his favorite youngling—and it’s invariably his own. You’re mine.”

“I haven’t been a Youngling in years.”

Obi-Wan ignored him with little but a sibilant murmur of endurance. _You still are a Youngling_ , snapped his eyes.

“They’re unhappy with you, Anakin.”

A frown had its own distinct sound, they noticed. A discontented hum.

“Are they ever not?” Anakin rent the bread between his teeth, attempting to appear fastidious only when Obi-Wan could see. As averse as he was to the practice of letting things happen, he let his master lecture. There was a great deal more to be explained, he knew, than he often appreciated. “They’re knighting me, aren’t they?”

“You have the potential—” the abhorrent word, overused and undervalued, grated on his ears “—to be an invaluable asset to the Light Side—”

 _Yet you can always appraise what is invaluable. Someone would buy and sell me, for a price. Nothing is beyond that noble pursuit of revenue._ Anakin would have said it, and bitterly, had his mouth not been filled with the nectar of that stolen supper.

“However,” Obi-Wan stressed with a tentative nod, “the Light Side’s proponents do not take kindly to contradiction, as is the case with many. They strive to see the good in you, and when you repeatedly—”

Anakin balked at the suggestion.

“What am I doing wrong? Is there something in me _so evil_ that whatever I try—?”

“ _It was the Patience Program, Anakin!_ Yes, you attempted to override the base code that dictates the functionality of the entire simulation, and yes, your alteration was successful enough to embarrass an entire class in front of its teacher, but if you’re wondering what possessed them to administer this absolutely tolerant penalty, _that isn’t the reason!_ ”

Anakin folded his arms over his chest, shifting out of the desperate sun. He felt his face growing warm despite the deepening shade, scorched instead by the same fight—the one they had been having ever since Qui-Gon…

“Why, then?” he asked, voice dangerously soft. Obi-Wan’s forehead rested on splayed fingertips and furrowed faintly beneath them.

* * *

“Why?”

Her palm twined along his wrist and settled there, extending to alight on longer fingers—light and tactile, lilac frond, purple city midnight.

“You’re angry.”

Her cheek left pale prints in the aching red skin of his shoulder. His very breath drew through her hair, and he swallowed her scent: the velvet musk of parliament, the crimson petals of Naboo. When the sun receded and the colors failed, the reds were the first to vanish. The eye perceived in indigo residues, and blue violet shadows.

“I’m never angry,” Padmé reprimanded, murmuring through a crumpled linen valley. “Tell me.”

“Let me sleep.”

“You aren’t tired.”

Anakin succumbed to the feeblest of smiles.

“There’s a simulation in the Hologram Room,” rasped his whisper on the ceiling. “A fountain. A set of bowls, about as shallow”—her took Padmé’s hand and turned it until it cupped expectantly in thin air—“as your palm. One at a time, they fill, spilling down, like over rungs on a ladder. And halfway to the very bottom, this infuriating bowl that never quite fills. Well—the program comes into play at this point, generating random figures in infinite combinations to dictate how long it will take to overflow.

“It can take minutes, seconds even; it can take weeks, or months, or years. If it takes more than ten weeks, they reboot—although I wouldn’t know that unless I’d seen the code. But it will fill anyway, eventually. That’s the immutable constant. It always fills up. The water always reaches the bottom.

“At least, that’s the idea. It’s called the Patience Program. Part of the Faith installation.”

“Your favorite,” Padmé teased, with her neck bared on the dimpled pillow.

“I can’t stand it,” said Anakin. “You could sit there for a year. It might never overflow.A lifetime is as good as eternity, where I’m concerned.”

“Did you break it?” Her voice, muffled by bedclothes, by traffic, by sleep, was almost inaudible.

“I just regulated it. The numbers aren’t random any more: they follow a rigid algorithm. Even a Youngling could predict the next set.”

“You did break it, then.”

“Hey. It’s perfectly intact. I just got _tired_ of it.”

A note of ironic laughter.

“You got tired of _patience_.”

“Go to sleep.”

“I’m not tired,” she said, even if she was. She lifted something from the mattress, something heavy with hydraulics and electrical impulses, through which Anakin could feel, vaguely, the pressure of her hand.

It was a graceful instrument, this ersatz arm, as mobile as the limb in whose image it had been created. It mirrored his intentions with precision, simulating muscle memory and performing basic motor functions of its own accord. But when it touched, where it touched—

Padmé brought the prosthetic to her lips and kissed its alloyed knuckles, tenderly, repeatedly—she turned it and caressed its palm, inadvertently marking it with the morning’s scarlet paint, sealed in the creases of her mouth. She crossed his face, if she could see, with cautiously hopeful eyes. She tried this always. She had faith. As if a bit of humanoid machinery could learn.

“Can you feel it?”

Anakin thought of it, considered lying. _Yes,_ he wanted to say: _Yes, I feel it, your warm orchid skin and your tiny, throbbing pulse, as if it were my own._ She was so temperate, so delicate and undefiled, that to look at her was to feel unworthy, or afraid of breaking a bone. And yet anyone, he thought, could be certain of the fortitude she commanded. All that is beautiful is not fragile, and he had been right—angels wield terrible power.

“No,” he said heavily. “Nothing.” Padmé did not waver.

“Just do what they tell you to do,” she replied, returning to her back with her ear against his shoulder. So he pretended. He projected the print of her lips over cybernetic fingers. He followed the sensation to his wrist, and let it go. He wanted to say something to let her know he felt it, that the impression was stronger than life, that he loved her for her faith in him—a faith he never had. So he said the first thing to enter his mind, the most affectionate words he had heard that day.

“You’re mine,” he whispered, as Padmé slipped away from waking.

* * *

 

“And so there are things,” said Obi-Wan, “you simply refuse to demonstrate. The Council is rigid. They want from you _patience_ , balance, self-discipline. And with your many _gifts_ comes an immense and very cumbersome _passion_. Every misdemeanor is another reason not to knight you.”

How many times had the same words been spoken, as if over an empty grave—each utterance nagging with equal, steady torment? Anakin laughed.

“And yet, they _have_ knighted me.”

“You’ve behaved yourself. The stoneware gleamed this morning.” My eyes glimmer in return, but when you laugh, it’s uneasy—as if you know.

Laughing uneasily, they skirted the open gold courtyard, steps paced in perfect synchronization. As a child, Anakin had leapt from foot to foot, desperate to match his master’s longer stride. Now, he exceeded Obi-Wan in height, but their gaits remained identical. Each found it equally absurd to think that this might ever change. A shallow staircase sprawled beneath their feet. The descent was littered with heaps of snowy petals and dappled shadows—the last of the late-blooming trees.

“But…” More severity, more rebuke, more of that ever-present grey concern! “The Council will be attentive as to how you fare as a Jedi Knight. Chivalry was never your strong suit.”

_Enough._

“But I _am_ chivalrous!” cried Anakin, an indignant smile to challenge an agonizing frown. “Look!” He leapt ahead, alighting below and extending up a hand, regarding Obi-Wan with a facetiously regal expression.

“Good lord, Anakin—” The latter had come to a bewildered halt and was blushing rather deeply.

“Go on—” Reluctantly, Obi-Wan allowed himself to be escorted down the stairs by a juvenile flirt.

Anakin released him with a condescending press, as if to congratulate him upon his tolerance.

“I’m still your instructor,” warned Obi-Wan, waiting for the color to recede from his face, “Knight or no. At least until first deployment.”

“A fact I don’t intend to forget, milord,” Anakin retorted, and buckled in the most flamboyant of bows. The toes of his boots revolved soundlessly around one another as he turned among the pockmarked midmorning lights, springing upright and ambling ahead. As his palm rasped along the rail he added, with only a superficial attempt at _sotto voce_ , “I still can’t believe I need a deployment.”

“Pardon?” Though Obi-Wan’s hearing had always been acute around his pupil. Anakin faltered, as his mentor drew abreast, to teeter on the rim of an indecisive pause.

“Just—deployment. I underwent my trials in a _single day_ so I could enter the Wars with you. I passed with _commendations_. You’d think they’d just let me carry on—with you. As an equal.”

Obi-Wan watched Anakin’s feet displace the stone beneath them.

“If it helps,” he offered, “you already are. More than an equal, I daresay—that is—you have surpassed me in many a—”

“ _Master_ —”

“Soon,” he said, with the decisive force of one who knows not quite what to say. “I promise.” The words felt foreign on his tongue.

“You promise,” echoed Anakin tonelessly.

They traversed the courtyard basin and shuffled down another tier. Anakin could not help but think of Patience, its vivid waters spilling over countless shallow rims. He wondered which garden would betray him, and never let him pass. His money was on whichever housed the treacherous berry-bearing tree.

When Anakin was seventeen, he had reached Obi-Wan’s height. It hadn’t been much of a feat—his master was no giant—and his pace followed naturally, aligning with the utmost ease along the rhythm of the older man’s shoes, through marbled halls and carpet-muffled corridors. Ever since, his restless legs begged new challenges, nimbler games. He devised a four-movement concerto for his feet to follow over stride-length spaces; he limped, walked backward, sidestepped, and whirled, all just beyond Obi-Wan’s peripheral vision. To Anakin’s delight, it had been weeks before his master noticed—and a full month before remonstrances were made. He still danced, from time to time, as if he thought Obi-Wan might forget him.

“We may be in luck, in any case.”

Anakin looked up from the pavement as it ebbed underfoot. Obi-Wan was fighting to conceal a smile.

* * *

He was framed by other, more eminent figures—sentient figures, figures capable of seeing his heart pound through his back and down his wrist. The years had taught him to straighten the tentative curve in his shoulders, make no expression, count the stars in the back of his mind. As if, should he falter, they would take his insides one by one: take the air from his lungs, the voice from his throat, the knot from the very pit of his stomach. He feared the High Council. He feared them. And they feared him.

Yet they made him feel braver, too. He was one of them, another looming chess piece on the winning side, exposed and defensible as anyone, a reckoning force. They might look down their noses at him, but they did so cautiously. The arrangement was mutual, this cordial exchange of fear. Fear made them uneasy; it gave Anakin power. He felt it most intimately, and introduced it to their ranks. He knew fear best.

Nocturnal birds cackled over open windows. Glass mirrored the mysterious city that suddenly appeared in the night—beacons and commuters, blinking lights without anchors in the dark. Anakin felt that way. Like anchorless lights, red and blue, and lost amid a vast, intangible black. He wanted dearly to reach for his master’s pale sleeve, so dearly that the fingers of his clever right hand thrummed restlessly in air. But he stifled the impulse, as he would any other. A desire for security was no different, he had learned, from a stammer or a furrowed brow. They could tell. They knew. They cast vaguely sorrowful glances of reproach in Obi-Wan’s direction.

“You know why you’re here.”

Anakin measured precisely, in moments, in breaths, how long it would take to raise his eyes into those of Master Windu.

“Not exactly, sir.” It was the same on every face. The flicker of the pupils, up and down across a body; the revolution of the head a degree to address some other matter of concern. There were two people living who did not look at Anakin that way. And only one of them was here. Needled, Anakin raised his voice, perhaps too quickly.

“I’m here to be given a task. To be deployed.”

A pause.

“Good. We intend to give you one.”

The hologram blossomed in the center of the room, like the birth of a sun—the Masters gathered around it as if drawn to its light. A new solar system with its own planets and moths.

A black beetle scuttled over an invisible surface, suspended by threads of illumined dust.

As small as Anakin’s thumbnail. Tiny whirrings accompanied its rhythmic dance.

“Is it a droid?”

Windu shook his head.

“A clockwork.”

The beetle opened, disassembled by a digital examiner. Cogs were amplified further into the range of perceptibility. Its construction was intricate, to be sure—a microscopic mechanism for every incomprehensible function.

“Sinea, after the assassin bug. You can imagine its directive. Highly sophisticated in design, and capable of anything except computing and learning. Its casing is flexible, as is the machinery itself—it can fold and unfold to fit through the smallest of spaces. It responds to external stimuli through a delicate system of pins along the exterior.”

His inimitable hand traced through the image, staggering pinprick rays, indicating and magnifying a structure that hushed the Council’s breath in awe. In fleeting spaces between his words, Windu looked at Anakin. This was his instruction, his assignment. It must be understood.

“ _It is highly destructible_.” There, the task at hand. “Its structural integrity is inherently weak. Such small parts may be broken, no matter the material, with minimal effort. But it has one final response.”

Anakin’s throat chose this moment to constrict. He had no fear of tiny mechanical insects, necessarily—his anxiety had peaked, rather prematurely, at a scarcely pertinent thought. Suppose Obi-Wan was not to come. Suppose deployment was for him, and him alone. He had undergone the Trials alone—was that not enough? And yet, suppose—

“Venom,” Master Windu went on, “contained in a pressure-rigged phial, sealed into the victim’s receptive neuron with a small electrical charge. It is that charge, and that charge alone, that alerts the victim to his fate. The venom is lethal. Most victims survive only hours.”

Obi-Wan turned his head just enough to allow his eyes into Anakin’s. So legible a face, and yet nothing seemed written there—there existed only a steady line, a space for communication, an open wire. It was all Anakin needed. He let his master watch him breathe, proving his equanimity, nodding his head almost imperceptibly. He still wished Obi-Wan’s sleeve were within reach.

“And what seems to be the problem, Master Jedi?” he asked politely. Windu almost laughed. The others seemed marginally less amused. Anakin could have sworn he saw Obi-Wan make a convulsive movement from the corner of his eye.

“Well, to be honest, Young Skywalker…We’re verging on an infestation.”

His smile did not abate until the hologram had shifted, the beetle vaporizing, replaced by humanoid columns of light. The solemn, vaguely familiar faces, forgotten until their images recalled their names to mind. Aaminah, Hindar, Kai-Tek, Kanu. Knights and Padawans of varying strata, with little in common save that they had been deployed and not returned. Not for months.

“They are dead. We have reached a decision to inform only those who must know. None of them expected the Sinea. They were assigned to prevent minor mercenary threats from coming to fruition. They found the clockworks—or rather, the clockworks found them. And the mercenaries in question are far beneath such sophisticated instruments.”

“You want me to find the source.” Another encouraging nod.

“Master Kenobi and yourself will be transported tomorrow to the…”

Anakin heard nothing else. The mounting apprehension relinquished its grip on his throat. Involuntarily, he turned to face his master, practically exultant with relief. Obi-Wan’s stoic profile slackened into subtle satisfaction.


	2. Chapter 2

“Be careful.” The beginning of a breathy _please_ was the sound of Padmé’s mouth as it disengaged from his. Anakin nodded, bowing so his forehead smoothed the creases of concern that valleyed hers, the sunrise stroking her hair with its eager red blood and his open black palm.

“Don’t worry. Just a little jaunt in the gutter.” He was smiling. He wasn’t afraid. “Obi-Wan will be there.” Padmé held her cheek between her teeth and watched his crescent grin.

“Tell you what,” Anakin added. “I’ll take care of him for you, how’s that?”

“He’ll take care of you.” Her finger traced his jaw and she returned his smile. She wasn’t afraid. She was afraid. He never could tell. There was only ever courage with her.

“Yeah,” he murmured, his stomach suddenly weak. He had to bite his lip and clear his throat before it freed his voice. “He will.”

Flattening his nose against her head, he kissed her once, on the bone of her brow where the hairline began. A rill of morning sun traversed the seam between his lips—he could taste it on the lining of his teeth, the taste of adulterated scarlets and the bruised rim of a flower’s flesh. He hoped she would wait. Instead of simply knowing he would return, remaining still in patience—he wanted her to wait. She knew what he meant.

 _Angel._ It wasn’t an endearment. It was what she was. The first conscious conviction he had ever made. Padmé pressed his hand so he could feel, her thumb buried in the dimple of his wrist. His realest fingers traced her knuckles one by one until they receded, trailed away below. With a reassuring smile, he turned to the unfurling dawn. 

* * *

 

“Ready?” Obi-Wan was smiling, too. The shuttle thrummed to life around them, the engine murmuring in the very depths of their stomachs. Anakin laughed.

“Spare parts,” he told the glaring console lights. “A milk run.” Obi-Wan gave his head a quizzical half-turn from the shadowed arc, cutting away a handful of red beneath the window.

“Hm?”

“Back on Tatooine, there were others…little boys, skinny girls and their m—” Anakin closed his eyes in fleeting irritation as he choked on the simplest of sentences. He eased the hitch with another soft chuckle. It was a fond memory, after all. Wasn’t it? “Our owners, or the ones who owned our mothers, they’d send us down this circuit to pick up food and tools, spare parts. We called it the milk run. It was dangerous—really, really dangerous—they’d go grey with worry, but the holders would make the children go. And it was so easy, no one ever got hurt. We liked it, after a while, but they’d always be afraid.”

“Easy,” Obi-Wan repeated, “but dangerous?” Anakin nodded.

“A milk run.”

His master didn’t seem to understand. Anakin might have known. As a child, he had sensed the effort it commanded simply for Obi-Wan to let him stray beyond the reach of a guardrail, or spar with other, less competent students. He never saw the balk, the frown, but he felt his master’s fingers bite into his shoulder when it came time to place him in harm’s way. It wasn’t that danger and Anakin had something of a lethal accord, though too often they did dance within each other’s reach. It had been the same for Amidala, for Qui-Gon, for anyone his master had known.

His master didn’t seem to understand because he couldn’t. Because, for Obi-Wan, danger could never be easy. It was Anakin’s conclusive proof. Love lived in everyone, even a damned fool of a—

“So,” said Anakin’s arm as it extended toward a row of switches overhead. “You going to let me fly this thing?”

“Every time,” said Obi-Wan with a touch of arch resentment, “for the last twelve years.”

“It’s your job, Obi-Wan.”

“To let you fly?” Anakin grinned and disengaged.

“To let me fly.”

* * *

 

When they landed, it was high noon. The cities looked the same, spires and obelisks of sun-bleached bone gleaming in their hazy exhalation, the heat of day and the halo of blue brume that crowned the highest towers. Their concentric tiles and golden crests were simply each a branch of the same dizzy fractal, interwoven with same sewers, the same fuel lines and water mains. It called to mind the ceremonial collars of senators and kings, these polished filaments of a common fount draped about the swollen bosom of the earth.

A yellow meridian swelter fell through the cockpit windows with a force that made it difficult to breathe. When the shuttle’s shudders ebbed away, and the safety restraints receded from their torsos, Obi-Wan and Anakin simply sat in a moment’s hesitation, letting their lungs expand against the trauma of the claustrophobic light. And then it felt fine, as any other Coruscanti noon in perpetual, florid gridlock. Boring, even, if deafening and blinding. The whir of the city was no unfamiliar thing.

Suddenly, Anakin began to laugh. His voice, still warbling ever so slightly past the peak of maturity, cracked as it trembled with mirth—his shoulders shook helplessly. He buckled, burying his face in Obi-Wan’s shoulder, where the latter felt the flutter of eyelashes and a feverish cackle. _Thank the Maker we didn’t bring the R2_ , Obi-Wan could scarcely help but think, even as his own mouth fought his conscience in a desperate bid for a smile. _The Council would_ love _to see this_. He gently nudged the boy away until Anakin was forced to straighten and drag a hand along his eyes.

“Sorry—” A grin still lingered on his lips. Anakin had the gift of a saturnine gloom that seldom left his face, no matter how happy he seemed or was. Even the smile had a vaguely reticent darkness to it, but Obi-Wan was accustomed to this peculiarity. He saw nothing but the boyish pleasure in his tautened jaw.

“Yes?” But even in faint disapproval, Obi-Wan would smirk.

“Pest control. My deployment is _pest control_.”

Obi-Wan spluttered his amusement.

“Not exact—well—”

Shaking his head, Anakin extracted himself and leapt out into a bracing urban roar of light and heat. Obi-Wan hurried after lest he lose him in the crowd.

“They’re very lethal pests!”

He failed to be entirely serious with his remonstrances. His anticipation, he assumed, was moderately greater than that of his pupil. It had been difficult to merely promise. He wanted Anakin by his side, as he was now, sly and careless and unabashedly precocious, with the frightened, eager child of Tatooine growing self-assured and strong beneath a threadbare veil. Anakin was a source of pride—but not of pride alone. Someday, Obi-Wan thought, he would number them, the things a little pod-racing slave boy had become, had always been. The pride, the love, the fear of loving, the fear of losing, the power to forget his fear or watch the child forget his own. It was too dangerous now, the voice in the back of his mind would say, to think that way. That voice dressed in immaculate robes and had a familiar old timbre, one Obi-Wan hadn’t heard since—well, it had been a while. Qui-Gon was the conscience, the believer in the force, the deft and unaffected. He was the consummate reminder of everything Obi-Wan had ever worked for. He kept away affection, love, and pride. But for how long? Anakin’s smile had been long in reemerging, and when it had arrived, the Force breathed a gasp of hope once more. And so, there was no denying it, had Obi-Wan Kenobi.

“So, where are we going, exactly?” Anakin was simply itching for an exhilarating scare, something dangerous that was bigger than a thumbnail and didn’t have six legs.

“The library.”

“ _What?_ ”

“Oh, pardon me. The _archives_ ,” he said, laughing through his nose at Anakin, who was attempting most admirably not to grumble.

They were permitted entrance to the deepest, most gruelingly occluded annals with hardly a wave of the hand. Anakin mimed falling asleep, his elbow balanced on a glossy reference console, when he knew Obi-Wan was looking. When Obi-Wan’s back was turned, Anakin scrolled through a sea-deep file of bulletins as they floated like fish across his screen. A memory pin, poised in the database receptacle, flashed with the occasional revelation of a new file. An hour might have passed before there came a soft, satisfied sigh from Obi-Wan’s meditative form across the alcove.

“Here,” he said, rising, as Anakin swept up behind him to examine his findings. _Wind-Up Life: Excerpts From the Records of D. Exu Zhr_. And later, a missing personnel memo, an arrest warrant, a red flag, a heist, and a wedding. It was all a bit intricate. But Anakin knew how to connect—or rather, he connected, regardless. He took the stylus and traced the spider’s web in green, omitting the red flag and a pair of haywire droids, incorporating an attempted assassination, a gang war, and an obituary. Finally he cradled his chin in his open hand and glared at the result, a three-dimensional layout of the labyrinthine sewer system.

“I really don’t know,” he said. Obi-Wan clapped his shoulder and collected the memory pin from the receptacle where it had been blinking exultantly.

“It’s good enough for me.”

Ah, thought Anakin, the blinkered ease of a world in which a powerful intuition was enough, more so than a minute, concrete fact.

They stepped out in their long cloaks, carefully touching shoulders so as to avoid separation in the metropolitan undertow, as if either could ever lose track of the other. Obi-Wan showed some door his open palm, and a room was laid out for them, a furnished oasis among the pyramids of boundless population growth and industrial dunes. A sweeping mosaic of pods and animated billboards between ancient towers fell below the window-wall, cast in faint blue shadow by the tinted glass. Two beds and a lacquered table punctuating the carpet.

“It smells like water,” Anakin noted, in some vague form of awe. Obi-Wan shuffled off his cloak and sat to assemble a map.

“Will you understand?” he asked. It was the sort of question one asked without looking up, but his eyes followed Anakin’s shoulders as they hunched in something like discomfort.

“Probably.” The younger sank, with affected nonchalance, onto the nearest bed. “I’m thinking.” He could do this, as he could anything else. He had always been able to calculate the sum of preposterous situations without much of what they called cognition. The tricky part was unraveling the glimmering solution, a practice upon which his master had always insisted, to make sure he was right. Check your work. It became a challenge when there was so little work to check.

“Are you alright?”

Anakin closed his eyes and nodded, but the image was clouded.

“Help me.”

Obi-Wan bobbed his head, rising wordlessly and perching opposite the boy upon the bed. The mattress gave beneath his knees. Anakin waited patiently as they settled back-to-back, legs tucked up, feeling each other breathe until they breathed together. It didn’t matter that the afternoon shone orange through their eyelids, nor that the city swept away below. Obi-Wan could make it disappear. Anakin marveled at the skill. He was always thinking, always feeling—his master let the extraneous phenomena of crowded life simply fade, until they vanished entirely. It must have been in the breathing, in the way he held his skin, for without Obi-Wan’s warm back against his own, Anakin could not release a single thought. Obi-Wan’s voice reached him through the solace of empty meditation. It followed the same pattern always, sketching out the channels of memory and solving them as if they were a maze.

_Why are we here, you and I?_

To be together. To be equals.

“To find where _Sinea_ originate, and to eradicate the source.”

_Where is this source?_

“In the sewers, the once-catacombs beneath this place. It’s where they come and go.”

 _Who comes and goes?_ Anakin winced as the thought fled his mind, too quick to quantify.

“People and their plans. Designs upon ending one another’s lives.”

_To what purpose?_

“To prevent the flow. The flow of information. No, data. Research. Building with their hands and their fine instruments, these assassin bugs. It’s just a weapons conflict, a contest. A race.”

A pod race. He’d been so impressed by the two hooded figures, tall men with solemn smiles and possessed by a maturing calm. They took him away, and he had wanted to go, but he hadn’t wanted to leave—

 _Anakin_.

Obi-Wan brought him back. The empty space had been swelling, like a moisture mine beneath a rare monsoon, with things he had tried so hard to obliterate from the wasteland of his head. Anakin felt very cold. He let his breath align with Obi-Wan’s again.

“The doctor, Exu Zhr, he figured it out. He mechanized the beetles, erected them from springs and microscopic pressure catches. He fights the others, the scientists and clockmakers with their pockets full of mercenary credits, and they win. They have it now, they just replicate the blueprints. So it’s not that bad. It’s just cronies, hoarding hydraulics fuel and selling to the desperate for a notch over market price, cronies who don’t know what they’re—”

“But?”

Obi-Wan felt intimately the hitch in Anakin’s rhythmic rise and fall, an inhalation too short, too sharp.

“But there are those with loftier aims and deeper locations. They need a couple governors out of the way.” A smile of warm relief stretched across his face. “Got it.”

“A milk run after all,” Obi-Wan said lightly as he detached himself from Anakin. But when he turned, the boy stared at his toes, a faint pallor tugging at his cheeks. He suddenly looked so young, much more like the biting child who won his freedom all that time ago.

“Do you speak Bolie, Obi-Wan?”

“Do I what?”

“ _Bolie_. Simie-munai?”

“I’m afraid not.”

Anakin sighed and examined the coverlet, avoiding the tepid blue of Obi-Wan’s eyes, devoid of comprehension. He was astonished that the words could mean so very little to anyone, let alone the man so inextricably wound through whatever place the past held in Anakin’s heart.

“My mother did.” With no little horror, he heard his voice go thin and rough, as if strained along a narrow slate somewhere within his throat. “She was born on Aris. Some of the kids, other slaves, they knew it too—the merchant had all kinds, you must have heard. We used it for insults and endearments, you know…Places the Standard couldn’t reach. I’d forgotten.”

 _With good reason,_ Obi-Wan might have said, for what his face assumed in the stead of an understanding smile. _Look at you._

“I’m alright,” Anakin mumbled, reading his master’s pity. Obi-Wan reached across their knees to press Anakin’s white-knuckled hand.

“So,” he said gently, “will you tell me about Bolie?” Anakin pursed his lips, thinking.

“I’m not sure.”

These things coiled in one’s innards, cold and armored as adders, stinging the raw, hot flesh inside—heavy and writhing and dark, but as real as anything. Triggers hid everywhere, nestled in the lightless folds of memory where he could not see. They seized him and he succumbed, powerless to resist. Obi-Wan saw the shadows cross his face. His eyes followed them, fleeting as they were.

“I _can’t._ ” Anakin choked on less than nothing; he choked on a void, a space between his temples where a picture should have been, where sat a forlorn frame. _Can you hear it?_ he thought. _Rattling around inside me? Space._

_Space._

Obi-Wan slipped around him, threaded an arm through the opening at Anakin’s side, held him to his shoulder. It was a familiar motion, a ritual for Younglings shaken out of bed by vivid and ever-present nightmares, when they seemed to haunt no other child. Yet Anakin had grown since then. He was taller, now, than Obi-Wan; his hair, delivered from the brutal cut of a Padawan learner, fell softly over his forehead in timid half-moon curls. Still, he buried his face in Obi-Wan’s tunic all too willingly, as if he had only been waiting for it to offer its familiar comfort, to fill his eyes with folds of light and heat. He did not cry. Obi-Wan felt a sort-of smile bloom against his skin. Anakin knew better than anyone the pain the past could conjure; but Obi-Wan recalled the rest, the summers and the yellow harvest moons, blue dunes and triumphs of the day. No fear, no violent passions or bitter desolation: only constant things.

“ _Qamkuna misk’i,_ ” Anakin murmured, with the stilted, limpid cadence of a long-forgotten native tongue. He emerged from Obi-Wan’s embrace, lips pulled tight but smiling with his eyes.

“I don’t—” his master began.

“It means—” Anakin cleared his throat. “It’s a way of thanking someone. Not for what they’ve done, but for something more recursive, more—One of those things the Standard doesn’t know.”

Obi-Wan watched the gently heightened color of his pupil’s face, a blush that colored the delicate whites of one’s eyes and deepened the shadows beneath them, only just. Something about the distinctly unabashed shade it assumed, something rosier than the sun-resilient Tatooine gold, inspired a vague impression of tenderness, affection. He could hardly help the dimpling of his cheeks.

“Are there others?” he asked, almost forgetting to speak aloud.

Anakin’s steady, saurian gaze was engaged in the windowpane’s unclouded blue, following the minnowlike glint of passing shuttles. He seemed to nod before he remembered why, and turned as if searching, the blush rekindling when he found his mark. Still the color was unperturbed, a flush of excitable pleasure or some other such vivid coral feeling. It was almost angry, in all its livid warmth, but not a flicker of irritation crossed his face. If anything, there was a sort of sadness in his smile.

“Yeah.”

“Yes?”

“But I have to explain.”

“Fine.”

“ _Fine._ ”

He moved deftly, as ever he had. Training had not been responsible for the precision of his every motion—it was something raw, unmitigated, as natural as breath. They called it inspiration.

He moved deftly, with immense care and no caution. He darted through the dappled afternoon, through his glassy blue frame and into someone else’s.

He moved deftly, and the light was obscured, and the air was snatched from Obi-Wan’s lips, the soft whir of fine machinery splayed beneath his ear.

Anakin had dropped a cursory kiss upon the corner of Obi-Wan’s mouth, where its pale impression pressed and faded, between a hand of flesh and blood and its mechanical pair.

“ _Canda munanee_.”

And without assistance, without so much as a primary lesson in the distant schools of Bolie, Obi-Wan could guess precisely what it meant.

No struggle danced across Anakin’s face, no shuddering breath to precede an indecisive stammer. He held position. He was waiting. The bedclothes stretched beneath them, cool and carelessly, with temperate patience in the surrounding hush.

Obi-Wan waited, too.

* * *

At length he let his breath seethe unfettered from his teeth, where he held it against the sudden emptiness that filled his mind. He was waiting for some unwelcome sensation—an inkling of surprise, perhaps, or shame. None came. He simply sat there, head still nestled in the palm of Anakin’s hand, still beholden to the utter equanimity of Anakin’s eyes, feeling as though the scene of not moments ago had been played, not an unexpected once, but over and over: in the fleeting exchange of happy glances, in the pride they felt to look upon each other—in the spaces of exasperation, in these so-called triumphs of a day. There had been a thousand spontaneous interludes, all gentle deft movements and whisperings, whisperings, whisperings. _Canda munanee_. Of course Obi-Wan had understood. He had said it already, and he said it still—every day for the last twelve years.

So he did it, the only thing he could do. He leaned, cross-legged still, his ankles touching Anakin’s, across the space between them; his fingers navigated the curls at someone’s nape. He brought himself level with a shell of a half-open mouth, wound like a conch in its miserable diversion, and hid it with his own.

He kissed Anakin back. He kissed, and Anakin returned, again and again, with the fervor of something like misery, determinedly despairing. This time, Obi-Wan tasted tears, let fall as Anakin kissed him from the height of this unaccountable sadness—shed by the pupil, guided down the master’s jaw. A law of physics, a natural course. When Anakin drew away his eyes were feverish, inflamed and dewy, the lids smudged with aching pink.

 _Why are you crying?_ Obi-Wan traced the tears town Anakin’s chin, an old practice, for dispelling old night terrors. _Shh. They’re only dreams, Ani. Go back to sleep._ _I’ll be here when you wake up_. The latter gave a familiar, if disused, watery smile—the kind that said _Thank you, but it doesn’t help. It can’t possibly. You understand._

“You know what the difference is,” said Anakin, wiping his face with the sharp bone of his wrist, “don’t you?” His neck craned in search of some distraction, the traffic below, the spires that glimmered even through the tinted glass. He bit his tongue before he said it, before he could make Obi-Wan understand. _I tell Padmé I love her, he meant. Because I love her. She’s everything to me. I tell you canda munanee. They’re the same, but you know what the difference is, don’t you? It’s not about more or less. It’s about wanting someone for your whole life, and having someone forever. That’s the difference. I’ve had you forever. I’ll have you until I die._

“What is the difference?” Obi-Wan asked softly, understanding.

“It’s not what they tell us we can’t have. It’s not like what they think is love. It’s more like knowing.” Not knowing anything in particular. Just knowing. He laughed a little, a laugh roughened by the exertion of unwarranted tears.

“I’ll have you till I die, won’t I?”

Obi-Wan gave an emphatic nod and promised without a thought, fingers tucking the disarrayed hair out of Anakin’s eyes.

“Absolutely. Always.”

Anakin still flinched at some distant disturbance, not altogether listening, perhaps.

“Ani, I _promise._ ”

“You promise,” he echoed again. It was Obi-Wan’s turn to laugh. He kissed Anakin’s febrile brow and pulled a thumb along his cheek, promising. “I’m glad you’re here, you know. I don’t know what I’d do if they sent me here alone.”

“You’d fly.”

“I’d get stung and die.”

“You wouldn’t.”

Anakin glared, leaning back on his hands and pointing his chin indignantly.

“You don’t know! You don’t know how things work without you.”

Obi-Wan could only shrug.

“No one does.”

It was only later that he realized he had given the impression of missing the point.


	3. Chapter 3

He awoke the night to the distant note of fitful dreams, stifled in the palm of a trembling hand like a little life born to be smothered by the waking. He rolled over and felt Anakin’s shoulders crumpling, a restrained retch bobbing in the dark. Obi-Wan hastened to the source, daring not turn on the light and see the heaving flank beside him. When he touched Anakin’s back, his fingers met beaded skin with some faint disgust, cold perspiration.

“Are you—?”

“I’m _fine._ ”

He hadn’t vomited, despite his best efforts, tugging blindly at his hair. “Nightmare.”

 _I know._ But Obi-Wan didn’t say so.

“Will you tell me?”

“ _It’s okay._ ” The voice that reached him through the hair’s-breadth black between them was furious—with the lonely anger of the foolish Labyrinthinians who haunted the Jedi koans. Anakin wiped his brow with the cup of his wrist in a tremulous deaf-and-blindness, let Obi-Wan’s hand splay along his shoulder blade. “It’s not—it didn’t—it already—”

It had already happened, and it hadn’t happened as in feverish dreams, with no pale sleeve forcing through the oppressive dim of fear and condescension. Obi-Wan was here, his tunic printing silken gestures in the night, ever silent, ever steady.

“I’m the best there is. They’ve been waiting for someone like me, I can see it—the admiration in their eyes, this quiet yes or no to everything I am. They _like_ me, they want to be like me. All of them. So why are none of them afraid? _Why is it only me?_ ”

“You aren’t afraid, Anakin. You feel—you feel intensely. It is not a weakness. It is something the masters, in all their wisdom, cannot do.”

Anakin nodded, and breathed ravenously of turbid night air. He was still, perhaps, somewhat absent from wherever he lay.

“Can you do it?” he all but hissed. “Feel? Intensely?”

The audible frown, the hum of discontented hesitation, rang softly through the groans of a nocturnal metropolis without. For the second time in a waxing life, Obi-Wan wished dearly to effect an effortless lie—to say _of course not, of course not._ Yet there remained whatever truths must follow: _I detach myself to honor the beloved dead, for whom I felt intensely. I divorce myself from the fear I cannot help but know, through no fault of yours, but because of you nonetheless—I remove my love, this vulnerable organ, this parasitic failure—I remove it for shame—I remove that which I believe to be undefiled and good—I remove it for my betters—I remove…_

“I can,” he murmured at last. “I do.”

Anakin’s fledgling laugh incised upon the declaration’s shell. He surged up from his anguished seat and leaned this or that way—Obi-Wan felt him shifting, a restless gathering in the dark, preceded by the humid ache of midnight sleep.

“Oh? You, weak and imperfect like me. For what?”

“You aren’t—”

“ _Prove it._ ” So severe were the words that they severed the unborn untruths, that by the time Obi-Wan could speak the lies had fled and only their antitheses remained. He had no choice.

“I’ve felt everything,” he said solemnly, to what he could not see. “I have been reverent, adoring, faithful, dependent. I have grieved for the object of my worship. I have hated the one he preferred, it seemed, to me. I have felt an ardent, even a violent obligation to fulfill his final request, as desperately as I would have wished it to concern myself—I realize, now, that nothing could have concerned me more deeply. I have felt pride, for you—and worry, and sorrow, and hope and exultation. Triumph and affection. I could go on. And I love you, Anakin—is that not proof enough? Do you believe it when I tell you I can feel, intensely?”

Wordlessly Anakin sank beside his master, face hidden in a surpliced shoulder, a forehead veined with rimey curls crumpling in its sleeve. He was not on speaking terms with comfort. Yet he let himself press stars into his eyelids on Obi-Wan’s arm, a half-formed embrace offering what little it could against the ugly throes of feeling intensely.

* * *

It might have been an hour before a gentle hand against his ear revived him.

“Let’s go.”

Wide awake.

“Now?”

“Yes, now. We’ll be home by dawn.”

“Really? Another little task about to go _according to plan?_ ”

“You’re a brat, Anakin.”

“And whose fault is that?”

The light cast a smile into its taunting shadow as the room blushed blue and gold. Obi-Wan was fastening his tunic, peering through the glare into a surging city. Anakin pulled the hair from his face, unused to its flyaway overgrowth, as much as it suited him. The promise of at least a small adventure seemed to have restored what color the unease of the night had blanched from his face. He looked, in fact, abundantly strong, consumed with the fortifying confidence at which Obi-Wan so often rolled his eyes. His breath came with quick vitality, the tender red fled a no-longer-weary cheek. This eagerness was ever so familiar, and it meant the same anywhere—Anakin wanted this. There was nothing that could dispossess him of it; all belonged to him, as it always had, and the boy had pride in ownership. He smiled again, robust and sincere. Even the vague, becoming sadness seemed all but absent as the grin reached the corners of his eyes and gave a gentle tug. _Finally,_ it seemed to say.

Though really, the moment had already come. He wondered how long it had been there, waiting, for some overt acknowledgement, a nod of recognition. This, he knew, marked not the moment’s arrival, but its decision to finally clear its throat. Hello, Anakin. I believe we’ve been introduced. My name is the moment at which you choose to devote yourself without cause, to take up arms without invitation, to carry on, with him—as an equal. I’ve been waiting, you know. I thought it time you saw me. 

 _Hello,_ breathed Anakin, to no one in particular.

* * *

 

“They’ll find you, remember that,” Obi-Wan was saying, a nonentity in black beneath the sleepy lights of late-night pods above. “Let nothing in. You’ll have to concentrate constantly. If you let your guard down, for even a moment—”

“I know.”

“I mean it, please remember—”

“I _know._ ” For Obi-Wan, danger could never be easy. Anakin eased his voice with faint contrition, and straightened the other man’s tunic with a deft twitch of the fingers. An old practice. “You try to remember too, alright? _”_

“Of course.” Obi-Wan ringed the roughened safety rail with his palms and let the manhole swallow him to the torso. He sat for a moment suspended in its diminishing shade, looking up at Anakin, as if entertaining the thought of one final admonishment, please remember—but the hesitation faded from his face between the yellow palings threaded through the dark, and he slid away. Anakin balked. Something about the act, the impression of it, disliked him immensely. His throat opened slightly at the sound of Obi-Wan’s voice below, and he glanced down, seeing nothing but the hollow aperture between his feet.

“Come on,” it said.

Anakin laughed and murmured back, yes, he was coming. He closed his eyes as what little city light there was contracted overhead, reawakened in a colder, dimmer place. He had remembered. He pushed the very air away, the close and noisome stench of a city’s entrails, an invisible barrier of negligible radius barring him from his surroundings. He permitted only the soles of his feet to meet the crudely-paved walkway, while the Force encompassed him, and he bent it to his will. “May the Force be with you,” they said, but this was a method devised by Obi-Wan and Anakin alone. “May the Force surround you” was the joke. In exercises of awareness, a smaller, more precocious Anakin had once elected to deflect, without distinction, anything that came within his meager reach—to more than faint exasperation, as the particular drill had been designed to hone selective responses. But Obi-Wan had helped him to refine this insubordinate evasion, developing a new level of security, an elegant assurance. Nothing could get in.

Anakin liked to feel thus in control, no fear of accident or ambush. Not that such a trivial mishap would befall him—the greatest asset was certainty, to him a precious thing. In the dark, the cold and frailly ticking tunnels, there was but one small sacrifice to be had: his safeguarded hand could not take Obi-Wan’s, nor would his master’s touch receive it. Too cautious were they both, fancying already the distant rattle of sectile limbs upon vitreous stone.

“Do you think they can hear us, Anakin?” The elder man’s voice drew a soft golden jocundity from the grazed curvature of unseen catacombs, a comforting thing, an almost playful one. “These indifferent little creatures, indifferently hunting us down?” Anakin advanced and smiled as audibly as he could manage, hoping Obi-Wan could hear the teeth emerging, one by one, unveiled in sly appreciation.

“No,” he said. “I think they can feel us.”


End file.
